UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED

Highway Safety

Concern over automobile safety was heightened by Ralph Nader's 1965 book alleging that unsafe automobile design (particularly the Chevrolet Corvair) was the major contributor to highway accidents. This led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1965 and the Highway Safety Act the following year. Together they required safety features (seat belts, for example) installed in all motor vehicles and the development of comprehensive traffic safety pro-grams. Much like the government's regulation of air quality, these new safety standards made auto travel safer and led to a decline in highway fatalities.

End of an Era

By the late 1960s foreign manufacturers—largely Volkswagen, Toyota, and Datsun—were once again putting pressure on Detroit. While the recession at decade's end hurt American auto firms because people delayed purchasing new domestic cars, it helped the foreign companies as many opted to buy less-expensive models, which often turned out to be imports. By 1970 imports had captured 11 percent of the U.S. market, and with two oil crises over the next ten years, smaller, more-fuel-efficient foreign automobiles continued to increase their share of the market. As of 1987 imports made up 31 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States.

Sources:

James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975);

George S. May, ed. The Automobile Industry, 1920-1980 (New York: Bruccoli Clark Layman / Facts On File, 1989);

John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry (Boston: Twayne, 1984).

UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED

UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED. Published in 1965 by the then-unknown lawyer Ralph Nader, this exposé of the American automobile industry's disregard for consumer safety became a best-seller that electrified the consumer advocacy movement. Unsafe at Any Speed showed how the automobile industry consistently ignored and even covered up the dangers their products posed for the public. The public outrage provoked by the book helped assure the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which created a regulatory agency empowered to set design standards for automobiles, such as mandatory seatbelts. Along with Rachel Carson's environmentalist classic Silent Spring (1962), Unsafe at Any Speed reinvigorated a progressive regulatory impulse in American politics that had been in abeyance since at least World War II. But Nader's aim was not just to savage the design defects of one vehicle—General Motors' best selling Corvair—or even to criticize the automobile industry generally. Rather, Nader's true target was elite control of the state and of business–government linkages—what he called "the power of economic interests." Like Upton Sinclair's muckraking socialist classic The Jungle (1906), however, Nader's book failed to convince the public that capitalism itself contained flaws, but did result in greater consumer protection in one specific industry.

Nils Gilman

See also Automobile Safety ; Consumer Protection ; National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act .